On the TutsPlus.com site they've posted a new tutorial showing you how to register and use service providers in Laravel and how it relates to the service container functionality.

If you've ever come across the Laravel framework, it's highly unlikely that you haven't heard of service containers and service providers. In fact, they're the backbone of the Laravel framework and do all the heavy lifting when you launch an instance of any Laravel application.

In this article, we're going to have a glimpse of what the service container is all about, and following that we'll discuss the service provider in detail. In the course of this article, I'll also demonstrate how to create a custom service provider in Laravel.

The article starts with an overview of the service container and service providers, describing what they are and providing some example code/configuration to clarify the concepts. It then gets into the creation of your own custom service provider. In their case they create a provider that doesn't really do anything but it does help to show how to make it, register it and put it to use in a controller.